“Well,” said Emmons, “you’ve come to the wrong person. I am not a dispassionate outsider. I have known the Lees for some time, and have watched Miss Lee, and I know some of the difficulties she has had. There have been times, sir, when your father would not give her a penny for months together—and why? Because all spare cash went down to you. It was a dog’s life for any woman, but she would not give it up, until there was some one to take her place. She and I have waited one whole year, hoping we could lay our hands on you, and now that you have at last walked into the trap of your own accord we are not going to let you go.”
“I see,” said Vickers, “that like her all you want is some one to take the job of looking after the old man. I had no idea it would be to your interest, too, to disbelieve me.”
“To disbelieve you!” cried Emmons. “Do you expect any one in their senses to believe you? Does a man not know his own son, or a girl not recognize the cousin she was brought up with? You acknowledge that you come from the same place, you are the same age, the same height, you walk straight to his house, and it is not until you find that your being Lee means that you have got to work for your living that you begin to run in this story about your being some one else. No, sir. You will do as I tell you, or you will be arrested as you go out of here. Miss Lee telephoned me what your last game was, and I sent round to police headquarters for a detective. You can take your choice.”
Vickers was silent. He walked to the window and looked out at the city which lay like a spider’s web, far below him. He was a quick-tempered man, and had had his moment of feeling that personal violence was the only possible answer to Emmons, but the seriousness of the decision served to calm him. If he had had only the personal risk to consider, he would probably have gone. Twice in his life he had escaped the arm of the law. He did not doubt he could do it again. Indeed, there was something tempting in the mere idea. But his soul rebelled at running away from the whole situation—from the whole situation, and Nellie. He gave no name to the strange mixture of admiration and antagonism which she aroused in him, but he found no difficulty in giving a name to his feeling for Emmons. He would have wished to stay merely to put a spoke in his wheel. And what did it commit him to—to stay a day, or a week? He could always disappear the moment the situation became irksome. There was no obligation involved to Emmons certainly. If he chose to leave him day after day in the same house with his fiancée——
Ever afterward the sight of a city spread out below him brought the decision of that morning back to him.
“Well,” he said finally, “I’ll stay for the present.”
“I thought you would. We’ll go downtown now. And by the way, while we are on the subject, I wish to say that we can not have you running up bills in your father’s name. In old times there was money to pay them. Now there does not seem to be. I’ll get my hat.”
Left alone, Vickers turned from the window.
“It serves me right,” he thought; “I ought to have stayed and had it out with Cortez. Ah, Rosita, Rosita, your face was round and empty like the moon, but you would not have got a fellow in a fix like this.”